


The Lighthouse

by JCutter



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Astronomy, Crowley's Fall (Good Omens), Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, No Beta, No Dialogue, No Smut, Pining Aziraphale (Good Omens), Podfic Welcome, Stars, pulsars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 22:35:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20235481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JCutter/pseuds/JCutter
Summary: Crowley created pulsars for humans. A monologue about space and time and navigation and Falling by Aziraphale to Crowley.





	The Lighthouse

**Author's Note:**

> Written while taking a breather from my Big Bang Project. I've been doing some summer research on pulsar time-of-arrivals, specifically contributing to the NANOGrav array to detect gravitational waves. I saw this little tumblr blurb about writing what you know so I figured, why not? If you want to know more about the Bell in the story, check out Jocelyn Bell's after-dinner speech on pulsars and placement: https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/astr2030_12/sn/Bell.html
> 
> Hope it turned out well!

For seven billion years, electron degeneracy pressure holds out against the crushing weight of gravity. Ping orbitals off one another. You over there and I over here. They identify us by our protons and our electrons, some for you, some for me. Never together. _Ping_ the orbitals press us apart, hold us strong and separate as hydrogen goes to helium goes to lithium to beryllium to to to... _iron_ and we’re growing weak, my dear. Gravity presses all around and we’re losing, we’re falling, we’re Falling. Electron degeneracy _degenerates_ and electrons collapse into the protons, fuse in a kiss, fuse to join our other neutrons and that’s all we are, the kiss. The remnants. Not either of us. _Nu_ and _uter, neuter, neutral, neutron._ You and I stop pushing against each other because the each has gone.

The core collapses at the speed of sound, a _clap_, such an impotent word for the sound of thunder. If sound could travel in space, this would blow the eardrum of every living thing in the solar system. Nearly all iron, solid on solid. Too fast for the surrounding gas to respond. _Clap_ and there’s a sphere of neutrons without names and the _shockwave_, there’s a space between the core and the gas, we’ve never been so far apart. _Reverberate_, the sound to shatter all the living eardrums thrums through the gas cluster and we’re flying, flying, hotter than we’ve ever been. We die at iron, not another proton, stop right there, the greatest we can be in this form; it is the heat of this blast which fills the rest of the universe with every other atom. The hottest, the brightest, you can see a star wrenched screaming apart from galaxies and galaxies away. Screaming and flying and Falling, gone and gone and gone.

Across the universe, a wet and spongy planet sees the flash. Things squirm on the ground and make fire, make maps, families, countries, their name _human_, screaming and wrenching of their own. They look up and the course of history changes, the ape descendants will remember this flash for a thousand years. Carve it in stone, carve it in faith. Something _bigger than us_ is out there. Good, because a thousand years later, there is only a million-color smear in the sky, millions of wavelengths and the descendants can see so _so little_ of it. All they can see is the red of your hellfire curls, orange-yellow of those snake-eyes, the green of your catharsis, the white of your teeth, the blue and purple bruises seething through every minute of your past. Humans see so _little_ of it. They build silver instruments, pound the rocks into glittering sheetpaper, thread lightning through precious metal to see more.

My love, I know you made this before you Fell. God does not play dice, but you do. Every step to the next, a split of possibility. The star stops screaming five hundred years later. The collapse stays, the neutrons stay, and in those centuries there is now _tick tick tick_. Neutrons turn over each other and rub and spark and flame and alight fields of staggering attraction and repulsion, you pushed me so hard away, my love. The fields whip up whirling jets of hellfire radiation from either end of the star, spitting from demon hands. They sweep the sky with every rotation.

A lighthouse gleams across the cosmic sea now, space-time sloshing and splitting like the frothing surface of every water-soaked planet. It gleams, rotating, _tick tick tick_. Three thousand years after the flash, the humans sail these seas by the light of those ticks. Perfect cosmic clocks, well not fully perfect. As perfect as you, my love. Time and space, stretched and measured and cut by even better silverlightning instruments. Correct for the waves, and you can hear the ticking across millions of light-years and know where you are.

_Anywhere you want to go._ Here, love. The _ticks_, your lighthouse. Through the murky shades, to the tiny spinning machine with so much energy, the light threads and shines through the entire gas cloud. Humans used to think it was a star. Show me this one. Your heartbeat is less regular than your creation. Show me the clocks you left all over the universe so humans could _go_ and still find their way _home_. You fell in love with the first orrery you saw; I knew your passion for _navigation_ and _place_. Did you ever find yours? Back to the core now, to the clock. The neutrons froth and bubble over each other, spill over each other, the inside and the outside and the _outside_ all rotate at different speeds but all whip around in seconds or less. A young woman saw this first. Her descendants built the silverline instruments that correct for this; a Bell that rings across the sea. Young, so young, and more immortal than you or I love, because people will remember her by name.

I don’t know if you remember yours. It burned as your wings did, the stardust blasted away by the clap of thunder, the reverberation of _space_ of _rejection_, get _away you don’t belong stop asking this isn’t about you_. So much more personal than the clap of iron on iron you made. And blazing, burning, you scattered across the universe and created something so much bigger than yourself, not possible without you, not possible without the heat that burned so bright, fused new parts of you. Life and love, my love, you fell and I saw you. _I saw you_. Glittering in the sky with all the stars.

The ticking is here now, in this room. A grandfather clock next to a gramophone. Time is passing and there is wine-dark slosh between us, you on the sofa and me at my desk, and across the sea gleams a lighthouse. A blazing core with orange-fire eyes, _come home come here_, wrapped in warm, blackfeather curtains. _Tick tick tick_. It is only a matter of time, my love, before I navigate by your galaxy-blistering light and close the distance.


End file.
